South Korea enters the Great Game

South Korea’s gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to grow at 6% this year, which, though a less torrid pace than in previous decades, still leads to rapidly growing energy demand to sustain the economy. Since the late 1970s, electric consumption has increased a hundredfold, from 36 terawatt-hours (TW-h) in 1978 to 365 TW-h in 2005. (The terawatt-hour is a very large unit of electrical energy, equal to 1 billion kilowatt-hours.) Oil consumption has quadrupled since 1980, while natural-gas consumption, non-existent three decades ago, has skyrocketed to 900 billion cubic feet per annum.

..Virtually all petroleum needs are met through imports, primarily from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which are expected to reach peak oil production within the next decade. To diversify its energy sources away from growing instability in the Middle East, Korea has begun aggressively courting emerging energy markets in Russia and the Caspian Sea states, primarily Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

Asia Times